Hearing about Bitcoin exchange failures (most recently Bitfinex) is enough to spook a lot of people who otherwise might want to be involved in the cryptocurrency.
Personally, after "loosing it all" some time ago in the MTGox debacle, I vowed never again to let that happen to me. If you have been around cryptocurrencies for a while, you know that the only way to truly guard and protect your coin is to create and hold your own private keys and to keep the bulk of your holdings in "Cold Storage."
One of the problems I ran into while trying to set up as my own “Private Bitcoin Banker” was paranoia over generating a truly secure private key. For example, I wondered about the methods that involve jiggling your mouse on a webpage... hmmm...
Then I read about how to generate a key in the privacy of your own home with a single, ordinary, six-sided die. You can read that description yourself on http://bitaddress.org on the “Wallet Details” page.
When I tried that method, however, the BitAddress.org web page would not function on my offline Raspberry Pi computer. This left me with no good way to convert the resulting base six key into a format that my Armory wallet would accept.
After wasting considerable time looking for a base six to base sixteen conversion utility that would run on my "Cold Storage Raspberry Pi," I decided that instead I would use dice in a slightly different way to generate a base sixteen (aka hexadecimal) private key directly. Here's how I do it:
I use four dice instead of one. Each time I roll the dice, I record the result as a four-bit binary number. Rolling the dice twice produces a complete byte. After 64 rolls of the dice (whew!), I have a full 32-byte, 256-bit value. I then convert that value, hexadecimal nibble by nibble, into a 32 byte hexadecimal private key.
For my convenience (and now yours as well!) I created a worksheet for recording and converting the dice rolls.
For the truly paranoid, if you are uncertain about just how random your dice may be, you may want to read the Diceware page and this article about making dice rolls more random.
Print This Worksheet and Roll Your Own Bitcoin Private Keys!
I hope this procedure is pretty clear, but I'll try to answer any questions you may have. You can use the linked printable form (just click on the link below the image above to open a PDF copy) as a worksheet for your own key generating pleasure. Why not find a handful of dice and give it a try? You've got nothing to lose but your paranoia.